EASTSIDE INN 40 ST JOHN STREET, LONDON EC1 (020 7490 9240). MEAL FOR TWO, WITH DRINKS AND SERVICE, £120
By now the wine buckets were meant to be overflowing with blood, the high streets strewn with the corpses of so many fallen restaurants that those of us wishing still to eat outside the home would have had to make do with a Greggs pasty. The horror! The horror! As Joseph Conrad might have said if he'd ever found himself feeling peckish on a British high street in the autumn of 2009. It didn't happen. Sure, some restaurateurs have found this recession tough and others have gone to the wall. But according to Harden's, a fine restaurant guide in so many ways, London closures have actually been slightly down over the past year, at just 64 – the lowest rate since 2000. Openings are up 9%. We can theorise as to why this should be: an eating-out habit among the British public so ingrained that even a severe squeeze wasn't going to snuff it out; savvy chefs who know how to cut their cloth to the prevailing circumstances. Whatever the reason, we should celebrate it.
I am particularly pleased for the Eastside Inn, a venture which had disaster written all over it in thick black marker pen. It belongs to chef Bjorn van der Horst, who has the name of a porn star and the palate of an angel. I loved his cooking at The Greenhouse, where he did extraordinary things with scallops and crisp praline, which shouldn't have worked but did. He then spent a short but unhappy period under the Ramsay banner at La Noisette before announcing that he and his wife Justine were to set up in London's Clerkenwell: high-end restaurant one side, bistro on the other, shiny open kitchen in the middle, lots of bare floorboards, springy banquettes and blood-red panelling. And pretty much as they made the announcement, Lehman Brothers tanked. I wondered if they would ever open.
But they did, and impressively, despite being a little out of the way. People come here not to be seen or talked about, but to eat. On a weekday night all the tables around us in the bistro were filled with people happily eating off each other's plates. The menu is admirably small – just five choices at each course – but the flavours are enormous.
Quail can so easily disappoint. It's a game bird which generally tastes not at all of game and sometimes not even of chicken. Here it is braised for hours, bigging up the flavour of field and hedgerow before being roasted with a sweet but not cloying honey plum glaze. Baby squid in the Basque style brings an earthenware pot with sweet curls of seafood, perked up with smoked paprika on a bubbling olive oil stew of peppers, onions and garlic. You clean out the bowl with your fork, then with your bread, and finally with your finger.
Likewise a Catalan-inspired dish of prawns roasted with huge amounts of chilli and garlic in a tagine-style pot had us chasing the sauce around the edges, and sucking prawns' heads for all the extra bits. It was one of those dishes you knew would make you stink the next morning but which was just too compelling. A bistro boiler-plate dish of sliced duck breast, served properly pink with a peppercorn sauce and crisp slivers of a pomme sarladaise, was less showy but equally on the money.
And then, at the end, a bit of alchemy involving sugar and cream and chocolate from a pastry chef who has been with van der Horst for years, and with good reason: a ludicrously light cube of dark chocolate mousse with a scoop of earthy tonka-bean ice cream; nougat glace served at just the right side of frozen, so that the ice crystals have all gone and what remains is the slight crunch of the sweet chewy stuff; a precise apple tarte fine which was a masterclass. Yes, we had three desserts between us. Hell, the skinny Italian women on the next table had three desserts each, and still found space for the macadamia nuts enrobed in caramel and chocolate.
Why has the Eastside Inn survived? Not because it's cheap. It isn't. A tenner for all the starters looks steep in places and the wine list won't let you off easily. The service, while never less than charming – they have a French waiter who actually seems to like his job – could be a little slack. But with an open kitchen you can always see the cooks working, so you know they are on it, and what comes out of that kitchen is just so damn good. That's why they have survived, and rightly so.★
